The Internet allows end-users operating computing devices to request content from many different publishers. Some publishers desire to send additional content items to users who visit their respective websites or who otherwise interact with the publishers. To do so, publishers rely on external content delivery services that deliver the additional content items over one or more computer networks to computing devices of such users.
Some providers of the additional content items rely on multiple content delivery services to electronically distribute their respective content items. Such providers tend to desire how their respective content items perform relative to the different content delivery services. Tracking services have arisen as a central reporting platform to allow providers to check performance of their respective content items without having to interact separately with each content delivery service. However, tracking services rely on data directly from client devices to generate reports, which data tends to be inaccurate much of the time. To further compound the problem, a provider will see discrepancies in a report from a tracking service and a corresponding report from a content delivery service pertaining to how content items from the provider perform relative to the content delivery service.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.